SOURCE: "A Family and Its Good Fortune," in The Spectator, Vol. 271, No. 8617, September 4, 1993, pp. 28-9.

[Brookner is an English novelist, nonfiction writer, critic, and translator. In the following review, she remarks favorably on The Stone Diaries, noting Shield's characterization and optimism.]

'I have said that Mrs Flett recovered from the nervous torment she suffered some years ago, and yet a kind of rancour underlies her existence still: the recognition that she belongs to no one.' This marvellous sentence is extracted at random from [The Stone Diaries,] Carol Shields's account of an unremarkable life, one which will fill her readers with amazed gratitude for a novel which fulfils its promise to the very end, and, more, one which will put them in mind of a more established social order, now apparently lost, in which there was an element of honour in upward mobility, and in which all ends...